The Hollywood sign, as altered by a New Year’s Eve vandal.
Photograph: Gabriel Olsen/Getty Images

Los Angeles residents awoke on New Year’s Day to find a prankster had altered the famed Hollywood sign to read “Hollyweed”.

Hollywood sign has tourists heading for the hills – and residents heading to court

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KABC-TV reported that Los Angeles police had dispatched a unit to investigate the apparent vandalism.

The prank was likely carried out to mark the electoral success in November of Proposition 64, which legalized the recreational use of marijuana in the state. Sale and taxation of the drug will begin in 2018.

Police also notified the city’s department of general services, whose officers patrol Griffith Park and the area of the rugged Hollywood Hills near the sign.

A police spokesman later said a prankster used giant tarps to turn the iconic sign’s two white Os into Es, sometime overnight.

The vandal, dressed in all black, was recorded by security cameras and could face a misdemeanor trespassing charge, said Sergeant Robert Payan.

The person scaled a protective fence surrounding the sign above Griffith Park and then clambered up each giant letter to drape the coverings, Payan said.

Hikers and tourists in the hills spent the morning snapping photos of themselves in front of the altered sign, before park rangers began removing the tarps.

KABC-TV quoted one such person, who posed with two fellow hikers with the revised landmark in the background, as saying the reworded sign was “pretty cool”.

Another said: “It’s kind of cool being here at the moment. I thought we came to see the Hollywood sign, not the’ Hollyweed’ sign. But hey it’s OK with me!”

The Hollywood sign was erected in 1923 and originally said “Hollywoodland”, to advertise a new housing development in the hills above Los Angeles.

It has been altered to say “Hollyweed” before – in 1976, after the passage of a state law relaxing rules concerning marijuana.

The same prankster, Danny Finegood, changed it to read “Ollywood” in 1987, in protest over positive treatment of Col Oliver North, the marine at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal.

He also made the sign read “Oil war” in 1990, in protest at the first Gulf war. Finegood died in 2007.